318 mind
hand, what are the grounds for concluding that the world that exists indepen-
dently of the human mind consists solely of a kind of stuff that corresponds
to our human concepts of matter? If consciousness is as fundamental to the
universe as are space-time and mass-energy, then the world independent of
the human mind may be comprised of both subjective and objective phenom-
ena. Or it may transcend human concepts altogether, including those of subject
and object, mind and matter, and even existence and nonexistence.
If one considers this alternative hypothesis, subjective experience need no
longer be banned from the natural world, and the scientific taboo against the
firsthand exploration of consciousness and its relation to the objective world
may be discarded. This move also encourages us to reappraise our categories
of “subjective” versus “objective,” and of “convention” versus “reality.” In the
words of Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam, “What is factual and what is
conventional is a matter of degree; we cannot say, ‘These and these elements
of the world are the raw facts; the rest is convention, or a mixture of these raw
facts with convention.’ ”^20 The existence of a concrete object like a tree, he
argues, is also a matter of convention; and our observation of a tree is possible
only in dependence on a conceptual scheme. The reason for this is that “ele-
ments of what we call ‘language’ or ‘mind’penetrate so deeply into what we call
‘reality’ that the very project of representing ourselves as being ‘mappers’ of something
‘language-independent’ is fatally compromised from the very start.”^21
The very distinction between the terms “subjective” and “objective” is itself
embedded in a conceptual framework, and there is no way to justify the asser-
tion that any truth-claim is purely objective or purely subjective. For example,
the assertion that the pizzas I bake are the tastiest ones in town may be objec-
tively true for one person—myself. Perhaps another example of a similarly
localized truth is the statement that all the points made in this paper are per-
fectly clear and utterly compelling. The truth of such claims may be limited to
one subject! Moving along the spectrum of intersubjective truths, other claims
may be valid solely within the context of a single family, a community, a nation,
an ethnic group, or a species. The validity of such statements is tested not with
respect to an objective reality, independent of all experience, but with respect
to the concentric rings of intersubjective experience. None of these assertions
is purely subjective or purely objective, but there is a gradation in terms of
their invariance across multiple, cognitive frames of reference. Some state-
ments may be valid only locally, in terms of specific individuals or societies at
a certain time and place; while others may be more universally valid, in the
sense that they are true for a broad range of individuals and even species. Errors
commonly arise when one assumes that a statement that is true for one limited
frame of cognitive reference is equally true outside that context.
One truth thatisinvariable across all perceptual frames of reference is that
perceived objects exist in relation to the perceptual faculties by which they are
apprehended. For example, perceived colors exist in relation to the visual fac-